{"title":"Onscreen/offscreen By Constantine V.Nakassis. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2022. 400 pp.","authors":"Sandhya Krittika Narayanan","doi":"10.1111/amet.13398","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.13398","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48134,"journal":{"name":"American Ethnologist","volume":"5 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2025-03-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143607818","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Brown saviors and their others: Race, caste, labor, and the global politics of help in India By ArjunShankar. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023. 336 pp.","authors":"Ishita Banerjee‐Dube","doi":"10.1111/amet.13390","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.13390","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48134,"journal":{"name":"American Ethnologist","volume":"22 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2025-03-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143607826","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The violence of democracy: Interparty conflict in South Asia By RuchiChaturvedi. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023. 250 pp.","authors":"Luisa Steur","doi":"10.1111/amet.13400","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.13400","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48134,"journal":{"name":"American Ethnologist","volume":"60 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2025-03-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143607819","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Plantation life: Corporate occupation in Indonesia's oil palm zone By Tanya MurrayLi and PujoSemedi. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 256 pp.","authors":"Stuart Earle Strange","doi":"10.1111/amet.13399","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.13399","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48134,"journal":{"name":"American Ethnologist","volume":"30 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2025-03-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143599947","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Religious authority in the urban mosque","authors":"Chris Chaplin","doi":"10.1111/amet.13388","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.13388","url":null,"abstract":"In Eastern Indonesia, young male Islamic activists articulate a notion of religious authority that reorients community life toward neighborhood mosques. By providing local communities with Qur'anic classes and religious services, these activists—affiliated with Indonesia's largest Salafi organization—have created a network of spaces in which they promote new religious lifeworlds grounded in the substantive relationships they build across these neighborhoods. But “being present” in the mosque pertains to more than physically existing in a space; it speaks to the processes and strategies through which activists draw from local Islamic histories, legal codes, nationalist tropes, and moral anxieties to make and remake an ethical image of Islamic belonging. Such practices reveal the relational, spatial, but also contingent nature of contemporary religious authority. Moreover, they refocus anthropological analysis onto the experiential and collective moments through which new moral worlds emerge.","PeriodicalId":48134,"journal":{"name":"American Ethnologist","volume":"56 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2025-02-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143393059","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"On epistemic aporias and the coloniality of (my) categories","authors":"Laura A. Meek","doi":"10.1111/amet.13387","DOIUrl":"10.1111/amet.13387","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This piece interrogates aporias of epistemic certainty by thinking through categories of medicine and <i>uchawi</i> (witchcraft) in Tanzania. I open with an account of how I misrecognized the meaning of a newspaper article about “head-switching operations” posted on a hospital bulletin board. I then offer a close reading of the colonial/anthropological archive and its epistemic disavowal of <i>uchawi</i> nearly a century ago to demonstrate this disavowal's similarities to my own mistake. I learned from this mistake to question the grounds on which I (like my colonial predecessors) separate and purify categories like medicine, religion, and witchcraft. I conclude by discussing how to interrupt that impulse: to recognize and refuse the epistemic conceits of singularity and closure, I propose epistemic humility enabled by “not knowing” and by inhabiting the undecided situation. This resists the colonial, anti-Black violence of the single story about Africa and opens to the possibility of storying otherwise.</p>","PeriodicalId":48134,"journal":{"name":"American Ethnologist","volume":"52 1","pages":"90-99"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2025-01-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/amet.13387","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143054841","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The fraudulent family","authors":"Sophia Balakian","doi":"10.1111/amet.13385","DOIUrl":"10.1111/amet.13385","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In 2012 the US government began requiring DNA testing in its Refugee Family Reunification Program, which was primarily used by refugees from African countries. The policy was established to allay concerns that refugees were committing “family-composition fraud,” or including people outside their families in their resettlement and reunification cases. In humanitarian contexts “fraud” has often been understood as resulting from scarcity, corruption, and mistrust, but it misnames practices embedded in distinct moral and social worlds. For Somali communities in Kenya, incorporating nieces, nephews, or unrelated orphans as sons and daughters is part of remaking social worlds in places of refuge. By examining how displaced people grapple with DNA testing, we can see that their practices, sometimes labeled “fraud,” emerge from moral economies of kinship. Moreover, the family emerges as a contested category, one that is essential to the work of the US and global refugee regimes.</p>","PeriodicalId":48134,"journal":{"name":"American Ethnologist","volume":"52 1","pages":"19-30"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2025-01-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/amet.13385","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142991985","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Improperty","authors":"Myles Lennon","doi":"10.1111/amet.13381","DOIUrl":"10.1111/amet.13381","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The cognates <i>proper</i> and <i>property</i> have a racialized relationship: ownership rights were historically rooted in white supremacist notions of propriety. Thus, Black people's efforts to challenge these rights entail <i>the improper</i>: breaches of rules that render us as property and as propertyless. I ethnographically illustrate this transgression to theorize the intersection of property and the improper, or <i>improperty</i>: modes of ownership that paradoxically unsettle the logics of accumulation and enclosure that are proper to the property form. I introduce <i>improperty</i> to contextualize nascent Black land projects that are funded through the nonprofit industrial complex, online crowdsourcing, and microreparations. These projects simultaneously reproduce the capitalized relations they wish to supplant <i>and</i> create exciting new possibilities for decolonial land work, minimizing the dependence on commerce and the settler state that has traditionally hampered Black farms. Embracing this simultaneity can deepen our understanding of the transformative power of Black land stewardship.</p>","PeriodicalId":48134,"journal":{"name":"American Ethnologist","volume":"52 1","pages":"7-18"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2025-01-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142936097","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"I was wrong when I studied Russian nuclear weapons scientists","authors":"Hugh Gusterson","doi":"10.1111/amet.13386","DOIUrl":"10.1111/amet.13386","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Having successfully completed fieldwork in a US nuclear weapons community, I went to Russia to interview a handful of the country's nuclear weapons scientists. Epistemologically, I made the mistake of viewing them more as variant weapons designers rather than as Russians. More seriously, I failed to think through in advance the risks to myself and to my human subjects of interviewing important national security personnel in an (until recently) enemy state where practices of surveillance and arbitrary detention were more salient than in the United States. This partly reflected a broader common sense in anthropology that focuses concern on vulnerable human subjects at the bottom of social structures, not on elites. In subsequent years the digitization of information has at least made it easier to conduct such fieldwork without carrying sensitive data across national borders.</p>","PeriodicalId":48134,"journal":{"name":"American Ethnologist","volume":"52 1","pages":"58-63"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2025-01-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/amet.13386","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142935089","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}